No, I really cannot remember that in my late-Victorian boyhood (McKinley being Consul), young persons when left to themselves were over-rigorously hampered either in speech or action. Certain words one avoided: but all these had many synonyms, apart from the fact that the things they stood for could be, and were, made livelily communicative in pantomime. In brief, all our unlegalized and callow, but consummated, amours were conducted with a civil furtiveness, yet without, in the last outcome, demanding any strenuous and time-taxing amount of concealment.
One found, instead, that society at large was here, in a benevolent, slightly flustered way, intent to ignore what was plain enough. Approaching points a bit more delicate, and entering now in reverie the Rooseveltian era, one found that intelligent husbands and intelligent parents had every logical reason to avoid publicity for all such discoveries as they, in either capacity, would particularly deplore. It followed that the Rooseveltian husband, or the Rooseveltian parent, whensoever visited by unavoidable suspicions, was at polite pains not to verify them. ... So the younger generation of those days was more quiet than are its current successors: but I cannot assert that, beneath this relative quietness, it was any the less sophisticated, nor that it sacrificed upon the altars of respectability any undue amount of carnal indulgence.
Chapter III. Which Touches Youth and Uncrabbed Age
I INCLINE, in short, to think that in human economy the younger generation has always remained a tolerably staple product. Its language varies, as does also perhaps, at times, the pitch of its voice: but its theme does not vary. Its age-old theme is, always, a restatement of the truism that its elders have lied about most matters, and have mismanaged all matters, beyond human endurance. And its mistake is—always—to believe that the lying and the mismanagement may by and by be remedied.
For youth, to the one side, has faith and hope. But middle age tends rather to dismiss these two cardinal virtues in favor of charity. Youth, in a less happy aspect, is heir to the superior pleasures of pessimism, and to the warm gustos of moral indignation: but middle age has mastered that invaluable gesture which is known as a shrug.
Meanwhile, until forty-five or thereabouts, no man has any first-hand knowledge as to the average of human life, through the sufficing reason that he has seen but tatters and small scattered segments of the affair. At forty-five, though, he has watched his own thinned generation straggle into maturity, and the generation of his parents filed away in caskets. Old age still remains to be endured—perhaps. But he has observed it, day by day, through near half a century: he has seen his elders pass, by the hundreds, baffled and withered and yet, in some pathetic way, content enough: so that he knows in general terms what old age too is like.
Thus does it come about that to whosoever reaches forty-five the entire average course of human life has been displayed in somewhat the bewildering fashion of a moving picture of which the first and second halves are being shown simultaneously on the same screen. The spectator has got little enough out of it, God knows. Even so, he has the sad advantage of one who has not yet witnessed the inconsequent, astounding jumble. He at least has perceived it all with his own senses: he has perceived, with an immediacy which no report can parallel, what actually does befall the average man between the hours of birth and death: and it remains an affair of which his knowledge, howsoever blurred, and howsoever limited, comes to him at first hand. He is not dependent, as his juniors yet stay necessarily dependent, as even the superior thirties yet stay dependent, upon guesswork and the statements of others and those extremely misleading posters in the lobby. . . . Or let us vary the figure. Let us say that the traveler who has made a journey, it matters not how unperceptive his nature, does, after all, know more about that particular journey than is ever revealed to the most faithful and the most imaginative student of guidebooks.
Chapter IV. Which Records a Strange Truism
THUS, then, the average of human life has been shown in its entirety to every man of forty-five. The verdicts vary: but you may note, even so, that after forty-five the cynic and the pessimist turn unaccountably mellow. Life, it would seem, like a trip to the dentist, is not so very bad, after all, once you have put up with it. Life does not bid fair, to the tiring eyes of forty-five, ever to become a perfect business: and to preserve any especial altruism at forty-five is to present a happily rare case of arrested development. But the point is that when the performance has been witnessed, in its entirety, and with one’s own senses, then the average of human life does tend to seem well enough just as it stands. The lying and the mismanagement do not promise ever to be rectified: but that appears hardly an elegiac matter, after all; for middle age, I repeat, has mastered that invaluable gesture which is known as a shrug.
Such is the discovery made by all men at forty-five or thereabouts: such, if you so prefer to phrase it, is the illusion to which middle age becomes a victim: such, in any case, is the eternal crux between middle age and youth. Youth is credulous in many matters, but upon one single issue youth stays as iron and granite: youth does not even believe that life serves well enough just as it stands. To believe that such is just possibly the case remains the attested hall-mark of middle life. . . . Thereafter optimism develops insidiously: and the most of us sink, cackling thinly, into an amiable senescence.
Chapter V. Which Chronicles an Offset
BUT it is with the younger generation in letters, rather than in life, that I am here the more distinctly concerned, now that time dissevers me from both. . . . And in literary fields there exists at least one rather striking offset to that particular bit of knowledge to which I have just now referred as being acquired by most men at forty-five. It is that any writer who thus comes to forty-five has purchased his knowledge without—at best—improving upon his chances of communicating that knowledge.
For, after forty-five or thereabouts, it is inevitable that a writer should cease to develop as a writer, just as he ceases to develop as a mammal. No one of his faculties, whatsoever else may happen to them, can improve after that all-arresting date. Some few—though not many authors, it more or less inexplicably appears,—begin to fail earlier. But the average writer has reached his peak at, to my finding, forty; and with favoring luck, with all that he has learned of technique to counterbalance a perhaps lessened exuberance in creative power, he may retain that peak for some years. Yet this retention profits him little. He has nothing new to give: and you may look henceforward to get from him no surprises.
Ultimately this does not matter: and, where the writer is at all remembered, posterity selects, in a rough and ready and very often wrong-headed fashion, that which posterity esteems to be the best of this writer’s work, without any need to bother over the relative order of its composition. But during the remainder of the man’s career as a practising author this individuality which permeates the work of every writer worth his salt does matter a great deal, to the debit side of his ledger.
Chapter VI. Which Becomes Reasonable
FOR we ask—not at all illogically—that a new book shall contain something new. We expect, in fine, some element of surprise: and after a writer’s style is fairly formed, after his talents have each been competently developed, that is precisely the one element which he cannot supply. There is, from his point of view, no reason why he should supply it. He is still—so does he think, perhaps rightly, perhaps in merciful illusion,—still at his best, such as that best is. Yet, even be he right, each book that he publishes is a disappointment, howsoever loyally concealed, to his readers; and his most excellent work no longer produces the same effect upon his readers, because that excellence is familiar.